A cast of thousands moves sluggishly through an interminable plot. The turgid prose doesn’t help.
Sprawling frontier saga of love, loss, and revenge spanning several decades: a first from Colorado lawyer Gilchrist.
Spirited 22-year-old Mary Bullitt of Louisville, Kentucky, has tried her parents’ patience long enough. Her oh-so-refined mother is determined to marry her off without further delay, even though the likeliest candidate, General Henry Atkinson, is 44. The General has distinguished himself in campaigns against the British and the Indians; perhaps he will also be able to tame Mary. She, a headstrong hoyden, thinks he’s too old but is nonetheless intrigued by his dramatic tales of life on the edge of civilization, “where the most reckless desires of men were manifest.” This turns out to be Missouri, for the most part. On her way to St. Louis, the new Mrs. Atkinson demonstrates her pluck by coping with coarse types of every description, including a passel of backwoods brats who just for fun slowly break the neck of a trussed goose. The General is often away, fighting complicated battles with one tribe or another, and Mary fears for her own life when his nemesis, Black Hawk, appears. The General is too soft where Indians are concerned, people whisper, and no one understands why. Mary is perplexed by her husband’s evident attachment to an Indian woman known as Bright Sun, whose connection to Black Hawk troubles her. The General, however, offers no explanation. Years pass, relatives come and go between Kentucky and Missouri, the Atkinsons’ two children die of cholera, and Mary’s youthful beauty and vigor fade away. Here and there, other points of view take over: we hear from Mary’s cousin, Lieutenant Philip Cooke; the General’s diary is quoted at length; and even Bright Sun gets to tell her side of the story. But all lives revolve around the compelling persona of the old man, whose one great sin will at last be revealed.
A cast of thousands moves sluggishly through an interminable plot. The turgid prose doesn’t help.Pub Date: July 3, 2001
ISBN: 0-684-87143-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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